Stephen Bowden, now an e-published writer of Regency romps, ventures back into the Blogosphere.

Monday, 3 April 2006

Miss Snark gives her readers less than 24 hours to enter a writing competition, and gets over a hundred entries. That says something about the devotion of the snarklings. The offerings are being posted now, but it will probably take a week for them all to appear. They are going up in the order that they were submitted, and it looks as if the quality is improving as people took longer to draft and redraft. Yet even in the 18 that I have seen so far there are a few really cracking efforts. It will be interesting to see how mine fares at the hands of the snarkling commentariat.

Of course I shouldn't have entered; I should have used the time to push on with the rewrites. I also have the tricky business of coming up with a better title. Anne-Marie is happy with the Bridekirk Behemoth, but feels that Lord Alexander's Cipher isn't quite right, as he neither creates nor breaks the cipher in question. The trouble is, having lived with LAC;o,tBB for so long it is hard to get my head round any alternatives. I shall take advice at the RNA Oxford Chapter lunch tomorrow.

I saw this contest and couldn't resist - very fun, but after reading about thirty entries I found the words all blended together - the danger of everyone using the same words. I wish I'd been braver and used none of them, lol!

Surely if Mark Urban can subhead a book about George Scovell "The man who broke Napoleon's codes" only to apologize in the preface for talking about code when he really means cipher, you can ascribe your cipher to Lord Alexander even if it's not really his? Whose cipher is it, anyway? Otoh it's not quite fair to have the hero but not the heroine in the title, though with the behemoth around it could get rather crowded.